I have been meaning to post this information for ages, and fortunately after replying to a question in the VMware communities Andreas Peetz picked up on this and wrote a comprehensive article about these advanced settings, crucially explaining when to use them and why not to use them in production – thanks Andreas, excellent information!

Ok, these are vCenter advanced settings using the vSphere Client and give you some options of suppressing the CPU compatibility checks in vSphere 5.x when performing a vMotion operation.

Administration –> vCenter Server Settings –> Advanced Settings

Here is the sledgehammer approach;

config.migrate.test.CpuCompatibleWithHost = false

With this parameter set, all CPU-related compatibility testing throughout the vCenter Server are disabled. If you have ESX/ESXi hosts on different hardware, the CPU compatibility won’t be tested, and this could have serious knock-on impacts to the VMs.

Given the risks, you may want to look at using one of the following instead;

config.migrate.test.CpuCompatibleMonitorSupport = false

With this parameter set, the “product version does not support features” errors will be suppressed, but other CPU compatibility errors will still be tested for.

config.migrate.test.CpuCompatibleError = false

With this parameter set, the CPU compatibility warnings will still be displayed in the migrate wizard, but they won’t block the migration.

Remember, these are unsupported and not recommended for production environments … but extremely useful if ever needed, they have certainly saved me on a number occasions.